Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/405

 of his editorship he was scurrilously known as ‘Dr. Slop,’ and was the subject of several satires, of which ‘A Slap at Slop’ (1820) ran through four editions. His connection with the ‘New Times’ probably ceased in 1826, when he was appointed chief justice and justice of the vice-admiralty court in Malta, and on 27 July was knighted by George IV at St. James's Palace. Finding that the Maltese complained that former judges were imperfectly acquainted with their language, he made himself master of Italian. He gave entire satisfaction in his office, and the islanders had perfect confidence in his decisions. He published in 1830–2 (3 parts) ‘Trial by Jury: a Speech on the opening of a Commission in Malta for establishing a modified Trial by Jury, translated from the Italian.’ During an outbreak of cholera in the island he devoted himself to its suppression with great success. Returning to England in 1840, he made progress in an etymological theory, which he believed would supplant that of Horne Tooke, and he embodied it in a work called ‘Glossology, or the Historical Relations of Languages.’ Of this work he completed the first part only, which was published in 1858 in the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana.’ He died at 13 Brompton Square, London, on 16 Feb. 1856. In 1803 he married Isabella, eldest daughter of the Rev. Sir Henry Moncrieff Wellwood, bart. She died on 2 Feb. 1846, having had, among other children, three sons: Henry Moncrieff, who died while a pupil at the Charterhouse; John Frederick, a member of the Scottish bar in 1827, a judge in Ceylon in 1836, who died of a jungle fever while on circuit on 29 Aug. 1839 (Gent. Mag. 1840, i. 110); and William Wellwood, vicar of Charlbury, Oxfordshire, who died at Genoa on 21 Nov. 1856.

Stoddart published in 1801 ‘Remarks on the Local Scenery and Manners of Scotland,’ London, 2 vols. 8vo. Of his writings on legal subjects, the most important was ‘A Letter to Lord Brougham,’ one in the minority of the law lords by whom the great Irish marriage case, Queen v. Millis, was decided in 1844, and, as Stoddart endeavoured to show, erroneously decided. On this case he also published in 1844 a pamphlet entitled ‘Irish Marriage Question: Observations on the Opinions delivered by Lord Cottenham in the Irish Marriage Case,’ 1844. His legal acumen was also shown in his article ‘The Head of the Church’ in the ‘Law Review,’ February 1851, pp. 418–36. He translated from the French of Joseph Despaze ‘The Five Men, or a review of the Proceedings and Principles of the Executive Directory of France, with the lives of the present Members,’ 1797; and, with Georg Heinrich Noehden, Schiller's ‘Fiesco,’ 1796, and ‘Don Carlos,’ 1798. To the quarto edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana’ he contributed ‘Grammar’ (i. 1–193), and the introductory chapter on ‘The Uses of History as a Study’ (ix. 1–80); and to the octavo edition, 1850, an introduction to the ‘Study of Universal History,’ besides ‘Glossology’ in 1858.

[Law Magazine and Law Review, 1857, iv. 124–30; Gent. Mag. 1856, xlv. 524.] 

STODDART, THOMAS TOD (1810–1880), angler and poet, was born on 14 Feb. 1810 in Argyle Square, Edinburgh. He was the eldest son of Captain (afterwards Admiral) Pringle Stoddart, a descendant of the Stouthearts of Liddesdale and Ettrick, and his wife Frances, daughter of James Sprot. At the age of ten he was sent to a Moravian school in Lancashire, but soon returned to attend the high school and the university of his native city. One of his professors was John Wilson, the celebrated ‘Christopher North,’ in whose house young Stoddart met De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, the Ettrick Shepherd, Aytoun, Ferrier, Henry Glassford Bell, and others. He early began to evince a passion for angling, which afterwards became the chief business of his life. He was a very expert angler, having much delicacy of wrist, and a great knowledge of the haunts and habits of fish, besides being an adept at fly-making. In 1833 he was admitted a member of the faculty of advocates, but never practised. He busied himself with the preparation of papers on the ‘Art of Angling,’ which appeared in ‘Chambers's Journal,’ and were published in 1835 in book form—the first treatise of its kind that appeared in Scotland. In 1836 he married and settled in Kelso, where he found the surroundings so congenial for the practice of his art in the rivers Tweed and Teviot that it became his home for life. In 1847 he published ‘The Angler's Companion to the Rivers and Lakes of Scotland’ (3rd edit. 1892), which still remains an angling classic in Scotland, being distinguished from others by its Waltonian note of appreciation of natural scenery and literary excellence. His later life was devoted to fishing in his home streams, and in the Yarrow and other western rivers. He was much interested in the acts against the pollution of rivers, and several times gave evidence before the Tweed commissioners and parliamentary committees on these and kindred subjects. He died on 21 Nov. 1880, and was buried in Kelso cemetery. By his wife Bessie Macgregor, daughter of a farmer